"I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used hjkl keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys, so naturally he reused the same keys." As interesting as that is, John Graham-Cumming goes even further back in history. "The reason that keyboard had those arrows keys on it was because those keys correspond to CTRL-H, J, K, L and the CTRL key back then worked by killing bit 6 (and bit 5) of the characters being typed." Truly fascinating stuff, even though it's from way before my time (I'm from 1984).

I use currently use vim-tiny which on Debian and Ubuntu seems to be the 'default' vi-version right now.

My guess is because the old default which I used before that, nvi, doesn't support Unicode.

I do system administration and any time a server is really busy I just want a small editor start will actually start up in a reasonable amount of time, instead of vim ( which feels to much like emacs in size ;-) )

So in a roundabout way I want to say I'm a vim user too and it is my preferred editor on the commandline and the commandline is what is I prefer over the GUI.